SP–Arte 2023: Advisory Selections
Turning our attention from Hong Kong to São Paulo, SP–Arte opens at the Bienal Pavilion designed by revered Brazilian architects Oscar Niemeyer and Hélio Uchôa from 29 March to 2 April 2023.
Host to over 150 art and design galleries, publishers, and cultural institutions, the fair's 19th edition comes after a strong year for the city's art scene.
Adriano Pedrosa, the artistic director of Museu de Arte de São Paulo, was named curator of the 2024 Venice Biennale (20 April–24 November 2024). Pedrosa is not only the first Latin American to oversee the event, but its first curator from the Southern Hemisphere.
To celebrate SP–Arte's opening, we've selected our favourite painting, silkscreen print, sculpture, photograph, and tapestry at this year's fair.
Danielle Mckinney at Night Gallery
Danielle Mckinney has garnered quite the following since taking up painting full-time over the Covid-19 lockdown.
Night Gallery in Los Angeles and Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York have introduced the artist's brooding portraits of solitary Black women to a rapidly growing audience.
Taking her cinematic moments from magazine pages or film stills, she works from a black canvas, building figures up with layers of oil paint often punctuated with flickers of hot pink or red—evident here in the sitter's nail varnish and lipstick.
Mckinney's appearance at SP–Arte is just the beginning of a busy year. She will feature in group exhibitions at LGDR in New York (18 April–3 June 2023) and David Zwirner in London (20 April–26 May 2023) before her solo exhibition at Night Gallery in May.
Tunga at Galeria Luisa Strina
Galeria Luisa Strina is showing an iron-and-steel maquette of Tunga's historical installation Milky Fallings (1994). Presented at the São Paulo Biennial in 1994, the original work measured over five by three metres.
Constructed of five large bells and several funnels and goblets, the installation is a shining example of how the Brazilian conceptualist toyed with material. The iron and steel elements of the original 1994 sculpture were covered in slime.
Trained as an architect, Tunga was one of Brazil's leading artists. His practice encompassed spatial, conceptual, and baroque concerns.
Jose Dávila at Galeria Nara Roesler
Galeria Nara Roesler will show two of Jose Dávila's silkscreen prints from 2023—both titled The fact of constantly returning to the same point or situation.
Belonging to an ongoing series, they exemplify the Mexican artist's commitment to appropriating and recontextualising the ideas and visual idioms of his artistic forefathers.
The concentric circles of Hilma af Klint, Bridget Riley, and Frank Stella are the driving force behind these economical and dynamic pictorial planes, rendered with an almost mathematical precision that could be explained by his training in architecture.
Paint is worked in varying opacities that reveal the dynamics of his brushwork and make the raw linen canvas intrinsic to the final image.
Marina Rheingantz at Fortes D'Aloia & Gabriel
Brazilian artist Marina Rheingantz's deeply process-focused, semi-abstract paintings may be familiar to some, unlike her more recent venture into textiles and embroidery.
Debuted at her solo exhibition, Sedimentar (29 October 2022–21 January 2023) at Fortes D'Aloia & Gabriel in São Paulo, Rheingantz's tapestries and embroideries translate her expressive handling of oil paint on canvas into rhythmic weaves.
'When I was in London in 2015, I took an interest in embroidery and textiles and began researching the craft. Shortly after, I made my first painting which looked like it could almost be a textile,' Rheingantz explains to Ocula Advisory.
'When my mother saw the painting, she commented on how it would make a nice embroidery. Eventually, she transformed my work into a beautiful embroidery. We began to collaborate and have been making embroidery works together for over five years.'
Rosângela Rennó at Galeria Vermelho
Rosângela Rennó has devoted her 35-year career to unearthing archives and photos that some would rather forget.
Rummaging through collections both in her hometown of Brazil, and abroad, she appropriates and transforms this found material into larger installations or books.
Seeing herself as a researcher, Rennó is most interested in the inglorious episodes of Brazilian history subject to 'historical amnesia' by past political regimes.
In 2021, Pinacoteca de São Paulo celebrated her contribution to the arts in a comprehensive exhibition of 130 works from 1987 to 2021, titled Small Ecology of the Image.
Last week, she was announced the winner of the 2023 Women in Motion Award for photography, with a monographic exhibition dedicated to her at La Mécanique Générale, in Arles, in July 2023. —[O]
Main image: Jose Dávila, The fact of constantly returning to the same point or situation (2023). Silkscreen and vinyl paint on loomstate linen. 210 x 170 x 6 cm. Courtesy Galeria Nara Roesler.
